Friendly Web Tools Blog

Innovation is one of the first things on the chopping block during tough financial times. Understandable, especially if organizations are being asked to fund something that’s risky. But innovation has a partner up there with its neck also extended, which is marketing, I’m very sorry to note.

What many people don’t realize is that marketing is necessary for keeping your organization afloat, no matter what your organization is. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing fame says, “Every business is a marketing business.” That goes the same for nonprofits, because you’re constantly trying to stay in front of the people who believe in your cause.

And what is a website if not one of the cheapest forms of marketing out there?

“The Internet is the cheapest and most successful form of marketing around,” says Micah Sachs, Director of Web Strategy at InterfaithFamily.com, who I interviewed for an article that will appear in an issue of The Forward next month. He’s been using bargain basement web marketing to great effect. Namely, he’s instituted a few changes in SEO (search engine optimization) and Google Adwords.

After InterfaithFamily gave itself a modest marketing makeover about a year ago, its traffic immediately increased 63 percent. It’s seen a steady increase, and Sachs said that up through June 2008, he never saw less than a 40 percent increase.

Here are a few of the easy steps he followed to boost his traffic:

1. Give each page a unique title
2. Create URLs that match the article titles
3. Add article keywords on web pages

At first, it required a significant time investment, and he company brought in an intern who spent about 40 hours per week for 10 weeks writing in descriptions, adding keywords and generally optimizing the site’s old articles.

“But now it’s part of our culture,” he says. “Any time we create anything new on the site, we don’t even think of something as additional work. We create keywords, create title tags. It’s just a part of what we do.”

Once your organization has figured out a system for creating these three main changes, an increase in web visibility should come naturally and simply.

“This is all stuff that’s simple and straightforward,” he says. “It’s amazing how many sites of major orgs aren’t search-engine optimized. It will cost them no money; they just have to ask their webmaster to make some changes.”

There could be a million reasons people aren’t using your site - maybe it’s summer vacation time, maybe there’s something going on in the news that’s diverting their attention, maybe you don’t even have a site yet - but I think there are three main barriers that keep people from visiting a site.

Here are those top three reasons and what you can do to remedy them.

The Problem: You don’t know your site visitors.

Which is to say, you either haven’t found your target audience, or if you have, you haven’t reflected that on your website.

The Solution: Find your target audience/market.

This Target Market Worksheet (in PDF format) from Entrepreneur is a valuable exercise for any nonprofit.

The Problem: You don’t understand your site visitors.

A big part of making sure people are using your site is understanding what they do when they get there. If you pay attention with some analytics tools, you can learn a lot about where people are going or not going when they hit your web address.

The Solution: Get hold of some analytics tools and start using them.

Some of my favorites:

ClickTale

Clicky

Crazy Egg

The Problem: Your site visitors don’t know or understand you.

Sometimes it’s as simple as they can’t find your website. Or maybe when they get to your site, they can’t figure out what to do there.

The Solution: Start promoting your website (a topic I visit often in this blog), and start to apply some usability techniques.

Learn more at this webinar.

We just hosted a webinar with some friends of ours at Dinkum Interactive about search engine optimization. It was great and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback so far.

One of the biggest lessons we addressed during the presentation was the importance of looking beyond just the technology and just the marketing when it comes to coaxing people to find you on the Internet. It’s much more than having the right tools or writing the right copy. So-called search engine optimization is a full-on effort that ensures that you’re always promoting your company and making sure that people are always learning about you.

But there are a few things you can do to help coax search engines to move you up their web pages. One is clean URLs.

Every page on your website has its own address, or URL. Search engines, as do people, like to see these addresses when they make sense. So they’ll avoid cataloging those pages with such addresses as

http://www.talance.com/aspweb/ur123/do/results?firsttime=y&
set=search&referer=&edition=&sortResultsBy=TopicRelevance
=9644205E04CF9DBF1B850C0219204572_1188832070933&
urn=urn%3Abigchalk%3AUS%3BBCLib%3Bdocument%3B112707510

And prefer addresses that give a clear indication of the information on the page, such as:

http://www.talance.com/about-us

This can be done automatically if your CMS (content management system) has clean URLs installed. Then it will read the page’s title and make that the URL, rather than a mechanical string.
Try it out, and see if suddenly more people are able to find you online.

How do you reach your constituency when they’re teenagers, don’t use e-mail, aren’t on Facebook and the cost of texting is prohibitively expensive? It’s a good question that came in to me today.

One option is to set up a Twitter account and start promoting it to your audience. This is a service that you can access from your PC and send short messages that your teens can subscribe to. Think mini-blog. Check out this handy list of questions from Twitter’s site.

Otherwise, most cell phone providers give e-mail addresses to their subscribers, with their cell phone number at the beginning and their provider name at the end (something like 1235551212@verizon.com). It’s generally free to receive e-mailed text messages for them and free for you to send them. Ask your teens who they have service with, and this will go a long way to connecting with them.

When going over the designs for his website, a client of mine said, “If we put our newsletter on our website, why do we need to e-mail it to people too?”

My answer: “Because they don’t know it’s there!”

It’s a very common question, and a common misconception. Just because you build a website doesn’t mean that anyone knows it’s there. And it’s not a guarantee they’ll come.

In fact, people are fickle. You have to beat them over the head to make them visit your site, and then you have to make it easy for them to read your site, navigate your site and anticipate what they’re looking for.

All this takes a lot of research into knowing your audience and working with a company that understands the way humans interact with technology, but here are a few tips and tools you can follow to help bring people to your site and help keep them there:

Learn SEO. Make sure you write the copy on your site to attract the most people and the most search engines with search engine optimization (SEO). We’re hosting a free online seminar on this topic on August 5, 2008, so sign up to learn how.

Send a Newsletter. If you didn’t have an electronic newsletter before, get one now. Publishing news regularly gives you a chance to connect with your audience and connect to them while they’re at their computer. That’s the best time for them to click through to your website. We build newsletters into our content management systems, but many independent companies provide powerful newsletter tools, such as Constant Contact.

Advertise Widely and Often. Advertise your site everywhere. On your invoices, business cards, sticky notes, voice mail recordings, newsletters - everywhere. Slap your URL on it. VistaPrint is one of many companies that provides cheap promotional materials that you can use for advertising.

A client called the other day wondering why more people weren’t using their brand spanking new synagogue website. It was a nice site, all the bells and whistles, and there wasn’t a very good reason I could see that no one was using it. But it didn’t take long to figure out what the problem was.”Well, do the people in your congregation know about the site?”

“We sent an e-mail when it launched.”

“Do you mention it in your monthly bulletin?”

“No.”

“Do you have the URL on your business cards?”

“No.”

“Do you tell people during services that they can find more information on the site?”

“No.”

“Do you have a message on your voice mail about the website?”

“No.”

And that’s the problem with many websites - synagogue or otherwise. Just building it isn’t enough. Just mentioning it once isn’t enough. The marketing begins with other channels - and you undoubtedly have many available. Think about all the ways you touch your community, and make sure you use them to mention your website and its benefits.

Eventually they’ll come, and if you do it right, they’ll keep coming back.

Here’s another good reason for you nonprofits to set up your own websites: Google Grants. If you have 501(c)(3) status, you can apply to receive free AdWords advertising on Google – this is worth it! As cited on the Google site:

Google Grant recipients use their award of free AdWords advertising on Google.com to raise awareness and increase traffic. Three of our award recipients have achieved these results:

* Room to Read, which educates children in Vietnam, Nepal, India and Cambodia, attracted a sponsor who clicked on its AdWords ad. He has donated funds to support the education of 25 girls for the next 10 years.
* The US Fund for UNICEF’s e-commerce site, Shop UNICEF, has experienced a 43 percent increase in sales over the previous year.
* CoachArt, supporting children with life-threatening illnesses through art and athletics programs, has seen a 60 to 70 percent increase in volunteers.

Check out program details to see if you qualify. Google Grants recipients are selected every quarter, and they say you’ll know within six months whether or not you receive one.

Good luck!

Targeting and addressing your website audience isn’t a problem for synagogues alone. Web ventures across the secular and religious world grapple with the same problem. But it’s important to know who you want to attract to your site, because it will affect not only how you build it, but who might be attending services and programs.

Generally speaking, synagogues can target existing members or new members. That’s just scraping the surface, though. You should know:

• How old are those people? If it’s an aging congregation, they might not know or care much about technology, but that’s not the same for younger generations. All synagogues should be addressing a younger membership, otherwise your existing membership will eventually fizzle out.
• Do they have kids? If so, put information front and center about Sunday school or Hebrew classes.
• Where do they live? If it’s a snowy climate, put cancellations on the homepage. And always include directions.
• What’s their economic situation? Would your congregants be interested in auctions? Registering for a 5K? Can you tap them for heavy fund development?
• What gender are they? Men and women will each have different questions about your programs.
• Can you guess what kind of technical equipment they have? Are they accessing your site through a PDA? Are they logging on antiquated equipment at school?
• Why are they visiting your site? Guests might want to know about membership information or how to find your building. Members might be interested in volunteer opportunities.

Synagogue sites should be inclusive for everyone, but by finding and knowing your target audience, you can prioritize information for them.

Here are some useful articles on how to learn more about your target audience:

Defining Your Target Audience from the American Marketing Association tells you how to conduct this research.

Evolt.org’s Making websites: what’s your target audience? speaks from a more technical perspective.